Re: Linux in education advocacy side Re: Edutainment

[Duane Morin <dmorin@tiac.net>]

> > Hmmm... StarOffice?
> Corel has ported WordPerfect to Linux.  A nice port, rumor has it Corel
> will be distributing it at no cost (right now it can be downloaded on an
> evaluation basis).

Is the newest version (8) out?  I thought you could still only get 7.  <shrug>
I'd rather use WP than StarOffice, personally, but I think StarOffice might
turn out to be more useful.  It's a more complete suite, and a long time ago
Word gave WP a reputation for being hard to use. (no religious wars!  I said
I prefer it!  I just fear that many people won't even be willing to try it
anymore.)

> A major fallacy in today's computer culture is that graphical user
> interfaces are the *only* way to present information to the user.  There
> are many users who find GUI's cumbersome and non-intuitive. 

Coming from the generation of hacker kids that learned his way around the
machine by programming assembly, I agree completely!  I cringe everytime I 
hear a friend of my mom's tell me, "Oh, my grandson is into computers just
like you were!"  Yeah, except he's clicking a mouse and I was coding Lisp.

Personally I think that many(most?) kids have got the potential to learn 
whatever you put in front of them.  For some reason our expectations are 
shrinking.  Parents say "Don't teach my kids concepts, just teach them the 
buzzwords they need to get into college [or get a job]."  Don't use Pascal as 
a teaching language anymore, teach Java.  And so on.  Don't teach word 
processing, teach MS Word.  <shudder>

Personally, I'm more of a natural language fan.  I seriously believe that the
technology and the interface will always come down to meet the user, and that
the more important goal is to teach what to *do* with the machine.  Teach word
processing in a writing course, not a word processing course.  Teach spreadsheets in a statistics or accounting course, not a spreadsheeting course.

Woops, did this turn into rant? :) Sorry about that.

Duane